Louisa Lander
| Louisa Lander | |
|---|---|
| Born |
October 8, 1826 Salem, Massachusetts |
| Died |
1923 Washington, D.C. |
Louisa Lander (1826–1923) was an American sculptor.
Biography
(Maria) Louisa Lander was born in 1826 in Salem, Massachusetts, to a successful artist family. She was the great-granddaughter of Elias Hasket Derby, and her grandfather on her mother's side was a relative of the painter Benjamin West.[1]
She began sculpting in her hometown, then sought commissioned work in Washington, D.C. At age 19 she went to Rome where she studied with Thomas Crawford and worked as his assistant. She was part of a circle of American women expatriate artists in Italy at that time, including Harriet Hosmer, Anne Whitney, Edmonia Lewis, and Emma Stebbins, a group satirized by novelist Henry James as the "white marmorean flock." [2] After Crawford's death in 1857, Lander established her own studio. Among her patrons was fellow Salemite Nathaniel Hawthorne, who sat for a portrait bust.[3] Lander became close to the Hawthorne family in Italy but slanderous gossip about her character led the Hawthornes to break with her. According to the rumors, Lander had worked as a nude model. Her promising career floundered in the wake of the scandal.[4] Critics have made the case that one or both of the two female artists in Hawthorne's work, The Marble Faun (1860), could be based on Louisa Lander, given their relationship.[5] In the United States, she exhibited her lifesize marble statue of Virginia Dare (1859), representing the first child born of English parents in the Americas as an adult woman who had grown up among Native Americans and adopted their culture.[6] Despite the sculpture's popularity, Lander could not find a purchaser for it. Critical praise from Elizabeth F. Ellet and a place in Ellet's Women Artists in All Ages and Countries (1859) were not enough to reignite her career. She died in Washington, D.C.
Lander's subjects included historical, mythological and literary figures, most of them women.
The majority of Lander's works are lost.[7]
Selected works
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, Concord Free Library, Concord, Massachusetts
- Virginia Dare (1859), Elizabethan Gardens, Roanoke, North Carolina
- Undine (c. 1861)[8]
- Evangeline (exhibited at the Dusseldorf Gallery, New York City[9])
- Elizabeth, the exile of Siberia[10]
- Ceres Mourning for Proserpine[11]
Notes
- ↑ "Louisa Lander". Cosmopolitan Art Journal. 5 (1): 26–28. 1861.
- ↑ Margaret Farrand Thorp, "The White Marmorean Flock," New England Quarterly 32:2 (June 1959).
- ↑ John Idol and Sterling Eisiminer, "Hawthorne Sits for a Bust by Maria Louisa Lander," Essex Institute Historical Collections 114 (October 1978), pp. 207-212.
- ↑ T. Walter Herbert, Dearest Beloved
- ↑ Lynch, Lynch (November 21, 2014). ""The White Marmorean Flock": 19th Century Lady Sculptors in Rome". The Toast. GENTLEMAN SCHOLAR SPONSORSHIP.
- ↑ Gardens, Roanoke Island, history.
- ↑ Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, American Women Artists (Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1982), p. 87.
- ↑ Ellet
- ↑ Nicolai Cikovsky, et al., Nineteenth Century American Women Neoclassical Sculptors, Vassar College Art Gallery, exhibition catalog, 1972
- ↑ Ellet
- ↑ Ellet
References
- Ellet, Elizabeth. Women Artists in All Ages and Countries. 1859.
- Gardner, Albert T. E. Yankee Stonecutters. 1800-1850.
- Herbert, T. Walter. Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family. 1995.
- Prieto, Laura R. At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America. 2001.
- Rubinstein, Charlotte Streifer. American Women Sculptors. 1990.
- Louisa Lander. (1861). Louisa Lander. Cosmopolitan Art Journal, 5(1), 26–28.